My contention is that the experience of listening to, say, Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, strikes some people with the force of truth. It is not some verifiable truth about the existence or otherwise of God. The music doesn’t set itself out as proof of anything. The sense of truth arises because the music seems profoundly true to some element of human experience. In that sense – though not in the ‘grass is green’ verifiable sense – it is experientially true. Art without that notion of truth would indeed be airy-fairy.

Absolutely. Agree completely. Have no trouble whatever agreeing comepletely – am aware of no tension at all between that and my chronic suspicion of the truth-claims of religion – the factual truth-claims, the claims that there is a deity and that the deity is omnipotent and benevolent. I have zero problem being powerfully moved by powerful art – also by certain kinds of landscape, and the quality of the being moved seems to me to be pretty similar. (Eve Garrard has a terrific essay on the way we are transported by landscape and how mysterious that effect can be, in the current [just out] Philosophers’ Magazine.) My paradigm example is ‘Hamlet.’ To some extent I think I know why it moves us the way it does – I’ve dug into it somewhat obsessively, piling up mountains of notes, and I think I know some of how Shaksespeare did it; but only to some extent; for the rest, I just think it’s a kind of magic. Not literal magic, but something that isn’t really completely explicable. Or that is only explicable by saying it seems profoundly true to some element of human experience. Actually that is it, pretty much. Maybe it is explicable. The thing about ‘Hamlet’ is that it seems profoundly true to so many elements of human experience, all packed into three and a half hours – love, loss, regret, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, irony, wit, lying, truth-telling – and an immense amount more. It’s not many plays that can do that. There’s something…exciting, exhilarating, a little alarming about digging into ‘Hamlet,’ because you keep feeling surprised. The more you dig the more you realize Shakespeare wove this web, the tightest most drawn-together web ever woven; that he laid all these little charges, that go off one after another, in every line – and you start to wonder, how the hell did he do that…

So I completely agree with George about that. It’s just that I don’t really think most religion belongs in the same category – because of the truth-claims about the deity. Religion without those truth claims is a whole different ball game, but that’s not what I’ve been talking about here all this time. And it’s not what Dawkins is talking about. (He says that, in one of the essays in A Devil’s Chaplain.)

That, I suspect, is hard for people of a stiffly rational temperament to understand. They look for some verifiable truth claim that they can refute. They think I am making a verifiable truth claim. No. What I am saying is that some truths, certain profound truths to experience, are not easily, if at all, verifiable.

But few if any rationalists that I know of would deny that. They don’t look for verifiable truth claims in everything. They do perhaps point out veiled truth claims that are lurking behind fluffy verbiage, like the kind we keep seeing in those soppy Guardian columns. But that fluffy verbiage is not the kind of thing George is talking about – so I think we don’t disagree all that much.

But we may disagree about the link between religion and uncertainty.

Uncertainty continues to exist: art and the religious instinct, I suggested, proceeded out of uncertainty. The uncertainty principle seems to me humane and ‘true’ in that it corresponds to our experience of life. It behoves even scientists and rationalists to be uncertain about that which they cannot know, because not everything is knowable by scientific method, only that which is verifiable / falsifiable.

But there again – they are. The scientists and rationalists I know are uncertain about that which they cannot know; it’s religious people who claim to know things they don’t and can’t know. And the religious instinct may have proceeded out of uncertainty – that seems quite plausible – but I’m not at all convinced most of it hung onto the uncertainty once it arrived at the religion. Some believers, true, will say that their beliefs are beliefs and that they know they’re not certain; but oh dear, what a lot of believers won’t say any such thing – and what a lot of them get indignant at people who don’t share their beliefs, which seems odd if they’re really uncertain about them.

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20 Responses to “Art, Poetry, Religion, Uncertainty”

I think I am reading something relevant in Pinker’s ‘How the Mind Works’. He is pointing out various common subroutines or implementations in human thinking that appear innate, and some of the evidence for them. This purported ‘drive to religion’ is plainly related to such innate systems and I would suggest that it is based on one of the mental short-cuts that allows fast operational decisions on imperfect evidence. The one I am thinking of is the one that lets us accept ‘Authority’ as a grounding for a fact or idea.

I think it possible that religion provides an Authority ready-made for a lot of stuff that if grounded in ‘because Dad says’ instead of ‘because God says’ would have to be re-established for every person reaching adolescence. To have a broad-based Authority (starting long before, say, the Educational Curriculum Committee) would allow a lot of social uncertainty to be dealt with once for all. VERY adaptive, for the right uncertainties; especially abstract issues that don’t result in a woolly mammoth steak on the table.

I really enjoy Pinker’s approach of looking at evolutionary drivers for the operations of the mind!

I’ve also found that, that I and another person can experience something we both agree is moving in a way that seems to transcend mere aesthetic appreciation. We can both feel wonder at this phenomenon and not be able to give a satisfactory physical explanation of it and yet I will always be the one to stop short of saying it has to mean there’s something else out there, something that makes it less reasonable to reject the specific ideas others hold about what they can’t understand.

To paraphrase Russell, if there’s going to be a mystery here, let it be the thing I can’t explain, not the explanation I’ve cooked up to resolve it. The former, at least, exists for sure, whereas the latter, ultimately, is my own invention. Mystery-transference solves nothing; it shifts the field of enquiry away from the question that really does exist to a still-less-answerable question born nowhere but in human imagination.

Beethoven’s Quartet No.6 B-flat Major. One of the world’s most beautiful pieces of music. It was composed by

LV-B in a state of profound deafness. One (well)documented account says that at that time, he was often observed writting while sat beneath his favourite oak tree, tears occasionally soaking the manuscript because he still felt his efforts to be inferior in bridging humankind with God – as this was his mission – and furthermore his task would never be complete.

I do feel that this music “is moving in a way that seems to transcend mere aesthetic appreciation”. As a non-believer Beethoven’s commitment makes no difference to the fact that I am an atheist. If I were a believer I’m sure it would probably comfort me immensly in my faith, for obvious reasons.

“I really enjoy Pinker’s approach of looking at evolutionary drivers for the operations of the mind!”

So do I. That’s one reason – but only one – Pinker is one of the first people I asked to contribute to B&W.

It’s also why I posted that link to the news item on the Taung baby. It’s extremely interesting that a faculty that developed out of improved ability to notice and avoid eagles has also produced Hamlet, the St Matthew Passion, Keats’s Letters, etc etc.

Well just so. (Then one has to wonder how many potential Shakespeares did have their brains eaten by eagles. Lots, no doubt.) I was pondering all that yesterday. Just think of all the millions and millions of eagle-evasions that necessarily preceded our arrival here. It’s innaresting. (A damn sight more innaresting than religion, I always think, which is one reason the accusation of boring dreariness against atheists is so exasperating. As if ‘because God’ is fascinating!)

‘I do feel that this music “is moving in a way that seems to transcend mere aesthetic appreciation”.’

And it’s not just art, is it? That feeling of being profoundly moved by something arises also when presented with certain things in science and mathematics. It’s related to aesthetic appreciation, but goes beyond that.

>Beethoven’s Quartet No.6 B-flat Major. One of the world’s most beautiful pieces of music. It was composed by LV-B in a state of profound deafness.<
Just for the record (and to show off my musical knowledge -:) ), I presume this should have been Quartet No. 13 in B-flat, opus 130. Quartet No. 6 is an early work (Op 18) and when Beethoven wrote it he had not yet started to go deaf.

I admit to smiling at the eagles’ obvious consternation as we gradually got smarter. They must have viewed it a bit like we see the viruses mutating to develop immunity to our anti-viral drugs. We are one out-of-control life form.

Nah – the eagles probably didn’t view it as much of anything at all. Thing about eagles is that they have no brain, or practically none. Nearly all the space in their heads is taken up by the phenomenal optical equipment. They’re not up there thinking ‘where did all those tasty primates go?’ They’re up there thinking – ‘there? there? there? there?’ – ‘ and that’s about it.